Enfilade

From Princeton UP:

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 400 pags, ISBN: 978-0691169989, $65 / £50.

Throughout history, China has maintained one of the world’s richest built civilizations. The nation’s architectural achievements range from its earliest walled cities and the First Emperor’s vision of city and empire, to bridges, pagodas, and the twentieth-century constructions of the Socialist state. In this beautifully illustrated book, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt presents the first fully comprehensive survey of Chinese architecture in any language. With rich political and historical context, Steinhardt covers forty centuries of architecture, from the genesis of Chinese building through to the twenty-first century and the challenges of urban expansion and globalism.

Steinhardt follows the extraordinary breadth of China’s architectural legacy—including excavation sites, gardens, guild halls, and relief sculpture—and considers the influence of Chinese architecture on Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet. Architectural examples from Chinese ethnic populations and various religions are examined, such as monasteries, mosques, observatories, and tombs. Steinhardt also shows that Chinese architecture is united by a standardized system of construction, applicable whether buildings are temples, imperial palaces, or shrines. Every architectural type is based on the models that came before it, and principles established centuries earlier dictate building practices. China’s unique system has allowed its built environment to stand as a profound symbol of Chinese culture.

With unprecedented breadth united by a continuous chronological narrative, Chinese Architecture offers the best scholarship available on this remarkable subject for scholars, students, and general readers.

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt is professor of East Asian art and curator of Chinese art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written, edited, or translated ten books, including China’s Early Mosques and Traditional Chinese Architecture: Twelve Essays (Princeton).

From Princeton UP:

Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0691181875, $65 / £50.

With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque—the first English-language book on the topic—Unver Rustem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between 1740 and 1800 the Ottomans consciously coopted European forms to craft a new, politically charged, and globally resonant image for their empire’s capital.

Rüstem reclaims the label ‘Ottoman Baroque’ as a productive framework for exploring the connectedness of Istanbul’s eighteenth-century buildings to other traditions of the period. Using a wealth of primary sources, he demonstrates that this architecture was in its own day lauded by Ottomans and foreigners alike for its fresh, cosmopolitan effect. Purposefully and creatively assimilated, the style’s cross-cultural borrowings were combined with Byzantine references that asserted the Ottomans’ entitlement to the Classical artistic heritage of Europe. Such aesthetic rebranding was part of a larger endeavor to reaffirm the empire’s power at a time of intensified East-West contact, taking its boldest shape in a series of imperial mosques built across the city as landmarks of a state-sponsored idiom.

Copiously illustrated and drawing on previously unpublished documents, Ottoman Baroque breaks new ground in our understanding of Islamic visual culture in the modern era and offers a persuasive counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of global art history.

Ünver Rüstem is assistant professor of Islamic art and architecture at Johns Hopkins University.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Notes on Captions, Transliterations, and Translations

Introduction
1  Setting the Scene: The Return to Istanbul
2  Pleasing Times and Their ‘Pleasing New Style’: Mahmud I and the Emergence of the Ottoman Baroque
3  A Tradition Reborn: The Nuruosmaniye Mosque and Its Audiences
4  The Old, the New, and the In-Between: Stylistic Consciousness and the Establishment of Tradition
5  At the Sultan’s Threshold: The Architecture of Engagement as New Imperial Paradigm
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Image Credits

From John Sandoe Books in London, published by Leeds Art Fund:

Anthony Wells-Cole and Barbara Walker, Wallpapers at Temple Newsam: 1635 to the Present, Issue 3 of Leeds Art Studies (Leeds: Leeds Art Collections Fund, 2018), 367 pages, ISBN: 978-0954797959, £50.

Stunning, large format illustrated catalogue of the wallpapers at Temple Newsam, one of the few significant collections in this country. Though many rooms were damaged or stripped of their papers, an enormous amount of conservation work has been achieved over several decades. Not least, a new company—the now famous Zoffany & Co.—was created to make meticulous reproductions of some of the wallpapers based on fragments. The wall coverings at Temple Newsam date from about 1700 to the present day, including half a century of rather unsympathetic redecoration from the 1930s on. Most of the historic Temple Newsam wallpapers have been found since 1979 during structural repair works and during restoration of the house between 1980 and 2009.

Ros Byam Shaw supplies a review in the March 2019 issue of The World of Interiors, pp. 63–64.

Some rooms revealed a rich palimpsest of patterns, stuck one on top of the other—17 layers in one maid’s bedroom. In all, some 400 different wallpapers were discovered, the earliest dating back to the turn of the 18th century—or to 1635 if you count the pieces of embossed and gilded leather wall hanging found in a room once used as a chapel. This beautifully produced book is a catalogue of these papers, each photographed in colour, each with a provenance. . . . [After 1983 Temple Newsam] began to receive donations of wallpaper, most notably from the Burford antique dealer Roger Warner (WoI Jan 2009), including samples from the archive of his grandfather’s company, Jeffrey & Co. Sixty-four different papers came from another large house, Ashburnham Place in Sussex. At least half of the book is devoted to these and to pieces salvaged from private homes . . .